Month: June 2019

It’s officially the last day of June of 2019 and I haven’t posted here since December 1, 2018.

Whoopsiedoodle.

It’s not to say I haven’t coded over the last seven months, but let’s just say that I have not been coding regularly. I kind of did, for a bit in February and March, but then barely at all in April or May, and not at all in January.

Long story short, the company I work at does an annual company-wide trip, since we’re a distributed team, and I learned… in early January, I think, that we were going to Scotland. Well, genealogy is a bit of a hobby of mine and I am 3/8 Scottish, with one of my dad’s paternal grandparents being Scottish and both of my dad’s maternal grandparents being Scottish. Now, when I’d first been to Scotland with my dad, we went to Cluny, Aberdeenshire, which is where his paternal grandmother is from. So I went all out on the family research in January on my dad’s maternal grandparents, who were both born and raised in Edinburgh before coming to Canada. I don’t want to discuss how much money I spent at ScotlandsPeople! By the time I went to Scotland, I went from knowing just the names of my great-grandparents to having identified all sixteen (or close to it) of my 4x-great-grandparents on that side of the family, mostly including dates of birth, dates of death, and many marriage dates.

Not only that, I had compiled a list of almost 50 addresses where various family members had lived in and around Edinburgh.

Plus, I had nine gravesites spread out across four separate cemeteries to visit, none of which were marked, except the one in freaking Kelso, down in the Borders area. How could I visit Scotland and not visit the one graveyard that had ancestors named on it? Answer, I couldn’t.

Grave of my 4x-great-grandparents.From the outskirts of Kelso, the River Tweed.The River Tweed on the outskirts of Kelso.

And here’s one of my favourite pictures from Edinburgh:

This is where my great-great-grandfather raised his family in Edinburgh, including my great-grandfather.

So April was filled with travel and then recovering from travel, then May was upon us and I had a wedding to go to in Virginia, which included spending like 30 hours there but it took me 20 hours there and back on a train from New Jersey, plus the flight to and from Newark. I left my place just before five in the morning on the Friday and only arrived at the hotel in Virginia past 1am on the Saturday. Let me tell you that I quite enjoy the train, but 9+ hours in a row on a train is… not ideal.

And that’s how we get to June.

In terms of coding, the crappy thing is that I’m stuck in my game. There is a legitimate game-breaking bug, but when I try to fix that, I break user sessions. It’s been super discouraging so that’s probably why I haven’t touched anything in June. We’ll see about playing with things this weekend, though.

I keep saying this, but I want an alpha out soon. Like, I wanted it out this weekend. But that was back in May.

Now aiming for around Labour Day. I think that’s doable. That’s two months. If I spend even just an hour a day, that’s 62 hours of work that I could accomplish on the game. Now, to be fair, I won’t spend an hour a day every day, but I think it’s absolutely possible to do at least 50 hours of work between now and Labour Day, even if that means some marathon weekends or chunks of four hours in a single night.